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Wednesday, January 30, 2013

If you ever wondered what a dysfunctional family was, read
THE DEATH OF BEES, and you will no longer be wondering.

Marnie and Nelly lived with their parents who were not married and who never
paid attention to them. They were too busy being on drugs and selling
drugs. The girls had to take care of themselves and were always left alone. Then one day they were truly
alone...their parents went missing and never returned. The girls knew
what happened to them, but they couldn't tell anyone. Their neighbor
Lennie saw their parents had been gone for a long time
and instinctively knew they wouldn't return so he stepped in to help. Lennie had issues of his own.

The book was somewhat disconnected and shared all the awful things that normally
occur in a dysfunctional family. The author portrays scenes
very vividly and leaves nothing to the imagination. She lets every detail
of the family's life out in the open for all to see and does it cleverly by
having each chapter's contents be the voice of one of the characters. I believe
she was making the reader aware of how often this type of life happens more
than we know and what many children live with on a daily basis. She was
also showing that the cycle continues from generation to generation.

Despite the author's attempt of trying to enlighten what we as a civil society
do not want to face, this book definitely would not be good for young adults. There
is a lot of vulgarity, sexual situations, drug situations, tension between
parent and child, and even murder.On a
positive note, it does touch on strong friendships.If this book were being rated as a
movie, I would give it an R rating.

It did get a little more interesting as the book continued, and there were some
funny parts. You can't help
laughing at the absurdity and utter unbelievability of some of the circumstances, but the book's disconnection with following the plot,
the vulgarity, and the unpleasant, but informative topic makes me give the book
a 3/5.

This book was given to me free of
charge without compensation in exchange for an honest review.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Did the storm really bring Sam along with it....the Sam who
disappeared 40 years ago? As much as Gretchen wanted it to be Sam, she
was worried that his return may mean that her secret/her lie would be exposed.

Regardless, it couldn't be anyone but Sam especially since it was well known
that his ancestors were famous for storms, lightning, and unusual things
happening when lightning struck. Could it really have happened again no
matter how strange....rain, lightening, and walnuts?

Strange things do and have happened at the
farmhouse where Sam grew up and where Gretchen and her sisters now lived. Strange things such as ghosts knocking on the front door and now the farmhouse being the only place
that had electricity when the entire town had none because of the storm that blew through town the day before with Sam on its coattails.

The Truth About Love & Lightening is a book that has lovable, appealing
characters with interesting backgrounds. The characters are the basis,
the wonder, and the root of what made Ms. McBride's book a marvelous read.

Ms. McBride always pleases her readers with a mixture of splendid characters,
great story lines, and a little bit of mystery. Waiting for the answer about Sam and also the
answer about Gretchen's secret/lie was cleverly and expertly carried out with
flashbacks and details of the current lives of the characters. The unhurried way Ms. McBride melts the reader
into the suspense of Sam and his family's past and also into each character's
feelings and believability makes you turn the pages not in an unhurried pace but
at a hurried, curious pace.

I really enjoyed the book because of Ms. McBride's smooth, splendid writing
style. She glides seamlessly from one period of time to the other and
gives you just enough information that you keeps you involved.

Don't miss
this marvelous read by Susan McBride which also teaches us about love and the
wisdom of living our lives where we are now, being happy with what we have now,
and not living in the past. 5/5

This book was given to me free of charge and without compensation by the publisher and author in exchange for an honest review.

Friday, January 18, 2013

THE LOST ART OF MIXING makes
you feel cozy inside and out. After being
with Lillian, you are relaxed and happy...she is just someone
who makes you
want to be where she is and where you want to stay.

In fact, most of the characters mixed well with each other just like a
perfect recipe. Each character blended together to make an
unforgettable
book about family memories, misunderstandings that turned sour
or proved to be a good
thing, the heartache of aging parents, and also everyday
situations we mostly likely are dealing with or will deal with
one day.

The book also had so many wonderful hints at recipes that it
made me want to
put the book down and get out my pots and pans and start
immediately on a variation of
Lillian's recipes. The characters in the story did the same
thing.
They made you want to stop what you were doing, they made you
want to join in the conversation, and
they made you want to become long-time friends with everyone
involved.I enjoyed every character no
matter whether
they were causing trouble or dealing with trouble.

If you need a comfy, relaxing
read
don't miss THE LOST ART OF MIXING.Ms.
Bauermeister has such a soothing way with her words that you
will feel as though you
just had the most wonderful massage everwhen you are done reading the book.Your body and your brain will not be on overload after
reading this book but will be in a splendid slow
motion mode.

ENJOY!!!5/5

I won this book from LibraryThing and received it from Putnam Books without compensation in exchange for an honest review.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

I read and reviewed SEVEN LOCKS in December, but I was somewhat confused about the title and its true meaning and also the meaning of the book itself.

I wrote to the author, and she graciously agreed to allow me to use her comments made on my review as a separate post so that others would not miss her true meaning.

Let's welcome Christine Wade. If you are moved by her words as I was by her book, you will find yourself making SEVEN LOCKS your next read.

Christine's Explanation:

"Thanks for asking about the title !!!!
You are right in that the meaning of the proverb "The future is a book
with seven locks." is not patently obvious. I take it to have a meaning
such as "Que sera, sera" or "What ever will be will be, the
future is not ours to see."

Personally, I think the beauty of a proverb is that some you get right away,
like "Speak of the devil, and you trip on his tail" not because its
meaning is so literal and obvious, but because you have heard them so many
times repeated in context that you just get what they mean. Unfamiliar ones
from other cultures are more mysterious and ambiguous. You know people have
said them for ages, so they kinda roll around in your brain but you are not
quite sure what they mean.

So "the future is a book with seven locks" has an authentic old world
ring that evokes the forward march of time by referencing the future. Time,
anxiety about time passing, lost time, and memory are all themes of the book
that are developed (but not explained) by this proverb.

So glad you enjoyed Seven Locks and glad you found that it has secrets. I
wanted to write a book with some cards up its sleeves that an attentive reader
could ponder after they put the book down.. The beginning epigraph and the last
sentence challenge the reader to unravel the secrets of the book."

Today I would like to Welcome Jon Clinch to my blog and introduce him and his book, THE THIEF OF AUSCHWITZ.

I have not read his book, but it sounds wonderful.

Welcome Jon and welcome readers of this post.

I hope you enjoy his interview as much as I did.

Part One:
On The Thief of Auschwitz

Q: Your
first two books have been called “among a small handful of the most American
novels since Huckleberry Finn.” What
moved you to leave that territory behind and write about, of all things, the
Holocaust?

A: Kings of the Earth was in many ways a
memorial to central New Yorkers of my parents’ generation—country people whose
voices are dying out and whose stories are on the verge of vanishing forever.
In The Thief of Auschwitz, I hope to
have created a second memorial to that same generation, this time honoring
those on my wife’s side of the family of man—the Jewish side—whose stories are
likewise in danger of being lost.

Reading and rereading the first-person accounts of Wiesel and Frankl
and Nyiszli over a period of a year or two, I had no plan to write a book. But
along the way I discovered something within myself that disturbed me to no end:
the more closely I studied the raw materials, the more repellent they became
and the more difficulty I had in maintaining my focus on them. It was as if the
facts themselves, horrible and numberless as they were, were conspiring to
drive me away again and again, preventing me from connecting with the people
behind them as fully as I needed to.

Supposing that other readers might face the same difficulty, and
intent on the preservation of these voices and these stories, I wondered if
fiction might provide an answer. I hope that it has, at least a little.

Q: How much research did you do? Did you visit
Auschwitz?

A: I
did most of my research in books. Laurence Rees’ Auschwitz: A New History was enormously helpful, as was the
BBC television series made as a companion to it. Mainly, though, I relied on
the well-known first-person accounts of Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl and Miklós
Nyiszli.

My
aim was always to seek the heart of the experience, rather than to mire myself
in technical and spatial detail.

There are drawbacks to not visiting the scene, of course. I'm sure to have gotten a number of details
wrong and those details may trouble some readers. That's always the case, regardless of how
well you research anything, if only because the demands of the story sometimes
cause writers to take liberties with time and geography. On the other
hand, I'm sufficiently aware of my limits as a researcher and as a
writer to know that---in my case, at least growing too intimate with the
physical details of a place can get in the way of following the needs of the
story.

Folks
have asked me the same question, by the way, about Finn and the Mississippi River—and the answer is the same. A few
telling details are sufficient to bring a place to life in the reader’s mind,
and that’s what’s important.

Q: We know from the beginning that certain
characters in The Thief of Auschwitz are doomed. How do you go about
maintaining interest and narrative momentum in a case like that?

A: That
was an issue in Finn, too—except that
it was Mark Twain, not the Third Reich, who had doomed my characters in
advance. Either way it adds up to the same thing. In Finn, I played with the presentation of time—twisting and winding
the narrative thread to bring the past and present together, just as they met
in the mind of the alcoholic protagonist. In The Thief of Auschwitz I rely on Max, the only member of the Rosen
family who survives Auschwitz, to provide some perspective. As one of the
narrators—the rest of the story is told in the third person—he speaks for
himself, reminding us that he’s escaped the horrors of the camp, and causing us
to be curious about exactly how that might have happened. His periodic
appearances, which bring the New York art world into contrast with the world of
the camp, also lighten the book’s mood and provide a separate narrative
interest of their own.

Q: Violence is a steady current in The Thief of
Auschwitz—and yet the truth is that violence at Auschwitz was often even worse
than you depict it. How do you reconcile that?

A: I
was definitely sparing with the most brutal violence, but not because I wanted
to spare the reader any pain. On the contrary. I wanted to keep readers
engaged. It seemed to me that the key to communicating the true evil of Auschwitz
was first to help readers commit themselves to a handful of vividly drawn,
realistic, living, breathing people. That’s why the novel begins in a resort
town in the mountains of Carpathia, where Jacob and Eidel meet and marry and
begin their lives. Once readers have committed to the Rosens, I don’t have to
punish my characters every second of every day. I can exercise restraint,
keeping certain things off-screen and letting various horrors play out at
second hand. The real truth, the compounding of wickedness documented in the
first-person accounts, would have made the novel unreadable and therefore
worthless.

Q. The Thief
of Auschwitz is quite cinematic. Are there plans for a film adaptation?

A: Not
at the moment, although you never know. Hollywood is a funny place. Finn has been optioned for several years
now by a first-rate production outfit—I’ve read the screenplay, and it’s
terrific—but I haven’t yet had the chance to buy a ticket at the box office.

Part Two: On
Publishing

Q: We hear a lot these days about the death of
big publishing. Are the rumors true, or premature?

A: It’s
not over yet, that’s for certain. What becomes of publishing in the months and
years ahead will be a matter of making the best use of technology on one hand and humanity
on the other. Technology is really good at the physical stuff—at solving
manufacturing and distribution problems. Witness e-books, and the electronic
marketplace that has sprung up around them. But when you start looking beyond
the physicality of the book as an artifact, you begin to see the parts of it
that technology can’t touch. Not just the skill that goes into writing it, but
the intelligence that goes into vetting it, the insight that goes into
marketing it, and the personal connection that goes into getting it into the
hands of readers. Big publishers have been fairly competent at those things all
along—particularly as regards large, commercial projects—but the distribution
side of things has begun falling apart under its own weight.

I believe that the technology-savvy independent who managed to deliver
on the human part of the equation—the connecting
with readers part—will be the one who thrives.

Q: What have you given up by going independent?
Editorial input? Marketing support? Credibility?

A: Editing
is a very personal thing that varies by the writer. When the time came for a
detailed discussion of Finn, for example,
my editor had three little Post-It notes stuck to the manuscript. We dispatched
them in a couple of minutes.

Marketing
support, of course, is huge. Big publishers create bestsellers by spending
energy and money on them. They also create failed books by ignoring them. It’s
pretty simple. As a long-time marketing guy myself, I believe that I can make
something happen in that department on my own. I can certainly make enough happen on my own. (A big
publisher will, of course, define enough very
differently than I do.)

As for credibility, I’m lucky enough to have
published a couple of novels that were extremely well received by the press. Finn was named an American Library
Association Notable Book and was chosen as one of the year’s best books by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Christian Science Monitor. Kings of the Earth was named a best book
of the year by the Washington Post and
led the 2010 Summer Reading List at O,
The Oprah Magazine. So I enter into this with some good credentials and
name recognition.

Q: Why haven’t other literary writers done
this?

A: I
have friends who write all kinds of books. Literary stuff, of course, but also
thrillers and mysteries and horror and chick lit and so on. The genre folks
have been much more willing to adapt to the new world of self-publishing than
the literary folks have been, and I suspect it’s a matter of perspective.
Literary writers revere the publishing system itself and everything that goes
with it—the imprints where their heroes were published, the long
apprenticeships through Bread Loaf and Squaw Valley, the physical weight of a
hardcover book—far more than they revere the part of the business that has to
do with commerce. They’re willing to take a small advance or no advance at all
to be published by even the smallest of small presses, because it signifies
that the house has found them worthy. Writers in the genres don’t see it that
way. To them, a reader is a reader is a reader. I have to confess that they’re
probably right.

Part Three: On Pen
Names

Q: Why did you publish What Came After as Sam
Winston, not as Jon Clinch?

A: To
begin with, I wrote the book as an experiment. I was weary of seeing what at
that time was a real spate of literary writers crossing over into science fiction
and horror, only to bring with them their usual stylistic and structural tics.
What was showing up in stores as a result was a bunch of genre books that
didn’t feel right to genre audiences, and that literary readers turned away
from because they were full of monsters.

I
wanted to go all the way: to write a real science fiction adventure with a real
rollercoaster of a plot, about real people facing real problems—problems that
aren’t, as it turns out, a very big stretch from where we are today. That’s
what sci-fi has always done best, right? And I wanted to write it in a style
that was different from my own, with machine-gun sentences that just kind of
rat-a-tat along to keep the reader in motion.

So
that’s what I did. And then, to complete the experiment and see how the book
did without interference from my name and reputation, I put it out there under
a pen name.

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...so nice to see you stopped by.
My blog began in 2010 simply because I wanted to give blogging a try and to have my own personal space to share my reviews. I loved visiting Portree, Scotland, and thought that would make a wonderful header because of the colors. It has since become my trademark. I also love polka dots and think it makes my blog, the header, and my personality come together.
My blog's goal is to introduce you to historical fiction and mystery titles and to promote the overall love of reading to everyone of all ages.
Please stop back as often as you like to see what reviews I have added to the BLOG ARCHIVE and for bookish fun and giveaways.
I hope to see you often.
ELIZABETH

In my delight with your review, I forgot to say you wrote a hell of a good review.Concise but hitting all the points and making it sound interesting to a reader.I'm surprised you haven't taken up the pen yourself!

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Ahhhhh...Scotland - July, 2010

.................Back in Scotland again this summer visiting my son...a lot of new things to see...old houses from the 1600's and quaint settings. We also went to London to see LOVE NEVER DIES...it is Andrew Lloyd Weber's sequel to THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Went to the Isle of Skye...what beautiful green hills, waterfalls, sheep, mountains...just fantastic. Stayed in a Bed and Breakfast in this most adorable, remote town called Portree...check it out...the photo at the top half of my blog actually is Portree, Scotland...love Portree. Went to York, England also...very quaint as well. The only thing I didn't like was the weather...definitely not summer weather to me...I need HOT temperatures. :) Also heard the Rod Stewart concert while standing on the Royal Mile....he was at the Edinburgh Castle in a stadium-like outdoor stage and we could hear it from the street.....pretty awesome.